Consumers generate and maintain large volumes of valuable data on their personal computers (PCs). This data, for example, may include music collections, reports and other publications, financial documents such as taxes and bank statements, videos and/or images that capture important memories, such as family vacations, birthdays, or graduations, databases of collections, and other data that would be difficult to replicate if lost. However, PCs can only hold so much data—and when consumers store their data on a PC, they run the risk of losing everything if, for example, the hard drive of their PC crashes or if portions become corrupted. Multiple PCs are becoming the norm in homes or in small offices, which drives the need to efficiently share and protect data across multiple computers without having to constantly copy the data between machines. Furthermore, with dramatic growth of Internet usage, there is a growing desire to share stored data with friends, family members or colleagues across the globe. Similarly, the growth of mobile computing devices such as PDAs and laptops are driving the need for ubiquitous access to data without having to constantly carry it. As a result, storage is no longer an afterthought for many consumers; instead, it is a priority. In fact, consumers are searching for more ways to efficiently and securely manage their data, and to make such data accessible from anywhere and to anyone. This trend is propelling the move of storage into the network and, importantly, increasing consumers' attraction to storage service providers. A Storage Service Provider (SSP) is a company that provides data storage space and related management services (e.g., periodic backup and archiving, secure sharing, etc.).
To provide data storage services, Storage Service Providers (SSPs) typically utilize a variety of storage systems that are maintained in one or more centralized Data Center facilities. For example, data may be stored on Directly Attached Storage (DAS), Network Attached Storage (NAS), a Storage Area Network (SAN), or some combination of these systems. Any one or more of multiple types of disk storage (Fibre Channel, SCSI, ATA, and CAS), tape, and optical storage can make up a storage infrastructure. Such centralized data facilities are particularly expensive to maintain, given the cost of real estate, power, cooling, and staffing in addition to the cost of the storage systems.
Although SSPs have grown increasingly more attractive to consumers as a data storage solution, there are presently a number of disadvantages to the consumer associated with use of a SSP. One disadvantage is that SSPs generally charge a monthly or annual fee that is based on the number of PCs or on the storage space allocated to the consumer as well as the bandwidth consumed to upload and download data stored. These charges are necessary to cover the high capital and operational expenses incurred to build and run such centralized data center facilities as well as create profits for SSPs.
A second disadvantage of using a centralized storage service is that the consumer may receive degraded performance from the service if the consumer is geographically remote from the service. The distance between the service and the consumer may adversely impact the performance of the storage service since the rate of data transfer between the consumer's computer and the service is limited by any network congestion between the two. Even in the absence of congestion, the distance between the service and the consumer may also adversely impact the service because of the network transit time of communications sent between the consumer's computer and the storage service. The network congestion and the network latency both impact the speed that data may be transmitted between the computer and the storage service, thereby adversely impacting the performance of the service that the consumer receives.
A third disadvantage of using a centralized storage service is that the storage devices at the centralized storage facility are under the control of the SSP, which may not know how a consumer wishes to use the centralized storage facility. Storage solutions offered by the SSP must be tailored to satisfy a large cross-section of consumers, which limits the ability of an individual consumer to select a configuration or service that best meets the needs of the consumer.